The Power Of The Free Market

I see where the Americans are getting a lesson in free marketry from the Iraqis. Yesterday the New York Times announced that contracts were awarded to China and Iran for the building of power plants in Iraq. Apparently large American contractors were either uninterested or too busy with their current projects to bid.

Iraq has agreed to award $1.1 billion in contracts to Iranian and Chinese companies to build a pair of enormous power plants, the Iraqi electricity minister said Tuesday. Word of the project prompted serious concerns among American military officials, who fear that Iranian commercial investments can mask military activities at a time of heightened tension with Iran.

The Iraqi electricity minister, Karim Wahid, said that the Iranian project would be built in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad that is controlled by followers of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He added that Iran had also agreed to provide cheap electricity from its own grid to southern Iraq, and to build a large power plant essentially free of charge in an area between the two southern Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

[snip]

“We are of course carefully watching Iran’s overall presence here in Iraq,” the military official said. “As you know, it’s not always as it appears. Their Quds Force routinely uses the cover of a business to mask their real purpose as an intelligence operative.”

“This is a free marketplace, so there’s not much we can do about it,” the official said. [My emphasis]

Dependable electricity is something in very short supply in most parts of Iraq, even after the United States taxpayers have spent billions to provide it. Part of the problem has been the sabotage of American efforts by the various insurgent groups, but an even larger part has been what can only be called shoddy workmanship by the American companies involved in the re-building of the country the United States broke. The current state of the Vatican-sized U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is a good example of that.

So Iraq, as a sovereign nation, wisely looked elsewhere, much to the chagrin of American business interests and the American military.

A free market works like that.